Long live Wikipedia: Dell Zhang on placing third in Wikipedia's Participation Challenge

Dell Zhang placed third in Wikipedia's Participation Challenge and agreed to give us a peek into his process.

What was your background prior to entering the Wikipedia Participation challenge?
I got my PhD in Computer Science from the Southeast University in China 9 years ago, and then moved to Singapore to work as a postdoc research fellow under the supervision of Prof Wee Sun Lee. It was very kind of him to send me to the first-ever Machine Learning Summer School in 2002 - that's when I discovered the fascinating world of machine learning. Since then my research has been centred around using statistical machine learning techniques to improve information retrieval and organisation. I am currently a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at Birkbeck, University of London. I have also joined the Royal Statistical Society and learned loads of interesting stuff done by statisticians.What made you decide to enter?
Being a busy academic I can no longer spend much time on coding as I used to, but I still enjoy getting my hands dirty and playing with data now and again. So when I got some time this summer, I decided to take part in a Kaggle competition to brush up on my rusty coding skills. The Wikipedia Participation Challenge attracted me most because as a heavy user of Wikipedia I felt obliged to do something helpful for the community.

What was your most important insight into the dataset?
The most important insight was that most user's future behaviour can be largely determined by his or her recent behavioural dynamics - how the number of edits and the number of edited articles change in the last period of time.

Were you surprised by any of your insights?
I am a bit surprised that dynamics features alone can go such a long way when we choose proper temporal scales and employ a powerful machine learning method.

Which tools did you use?
I used Python to write small programs for analysing data and making predictions. I like the simplicity of Python - simple is beautiful. The machine learning methods that I have tried all come from two open-source Python modules: one is scikit-learn, and the other is OpenCV. Finally, Gradient Boosted Trees (implemented in OpenCV) outperformed the other methods. I must mention that the parameter tuning was carried out on a big validation dataset shared to all participants by Twan van Laarhoven. "Such a nice guy", indeed!

What have you taken away from the competition?
A lot of fun, and a few lessons 🙂 I cannot wait to see others' secret weapons for tackling this problem. Long live Wikipedia!